3 am wake up call and wonderful diving…..

MEEEEH, MEEEEH, MEEEEH, MEEEEH, MEEEEH. WHAT THE F**K IS THAT? Emergency. An emergency is always good at 3am. Keeps you on the edge, you know. I don’t think we have ever been out of bed so fast. It is good to know you can move if you have to.

The stove in this place is propane. Plugged into the wall, 5M from the stove, is a gas detector. I don’t know how come it took all day and 1/2 the night to gather enough gas to set off the alarm but 3am is the time it decided there was too much gas in the room for its liking. We are the only guests here this week so it did not disrupt any other folks. It only took a part of a second to figure out the gas must be on. Debbie headed for the stove and I headed for the alarm shut off, it is a truly obnoxious noise. The stove was on. Can’t figure out how come it was either us or the maid that moved the dial when we were cleaning the stove. Debbie opened both the patio doors and the front door to dissipate the gas gathered on the floor. Didn’t seem to work immediately as the alarm started again in all its glory. We eventally stabilized the situation and headed back to bed with our adrenaline count about 3 times higher than it should be.

Lesson learned. Double, triple, quadruple check fourteen times a day to make sure the stove is turned off.

After our exciting night, we end up sleeping in so get a later start to our dive day than we were hoping. First stop is a dive site called Red Slave, on the southern end of the island. The entrance into the water is slightly tricky (uneven) so Murray helps me in and then gears up and comes in too. The dive is fabulous! We are starting to find the small stuff we love to find, this time a tiny file fish hiding in a soft coral.

Yellowline Arrow Crab

The winds are low today so there is talk that the dive site called Willemstoren Lighthouse is calm enough to dive. We head there for our second dive to check out the water surface and get the scoop from other divers. We are finding that talking to divers, preferably ones just coming out of the water, is a good source of information. We learn that there is little to no current. We can see that the wave action is only smallish waves, so we decide now is the time to dive this site. Apparently this site is not diveable a good part of the time, so we have arrived here on an auspicious day. Our big surprise of this dive was encountering the biggest, meanest looking, Debbie eating, barracuda we have ever seen in the shallows while we were swimming to shore.

Soft Coral

Two dives and now it is lunchtime! We have been trying the food trucks parked along the main road that runs north south. Today we share a chicken burger from Kite City, parked at the Kite surfing beach. Murray gets the top half this time with bun, mayo, cheese, bacon and chicken and I get the bottom half with bun, lettuce, tomato, bacon and chicken. Yummy!

We do our third dive just down the street from our accommodations at a site called Bari Reef. Amazing dive! We find a tiny mantis shrimp, juvi spotted drum fish, a boat load of coral banded shrimp and arrow crabs and tarpon cruising close to us.

A cute Toby

As we drive the short distance to our hotel, we agree that today has been a stellar day of fish finding regardless of our eventful middle of the night and late start.